Showing All 10 Matching Links Found
:
:
:
     
                   + Advanced Options                    + Search Tips
12/13/2012  Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke
If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me. Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank. The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows." This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the "legitimate" banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank's teller windows. Tony Montana's henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional "American City Bank" in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain's most storied financial institutions. (Rolling Stone)
posted: 12/21/12                   0       23
#1 



12/7/2012  Obama's Pot Problem: Now that states have started legalizing recreational marijuana, will the president continue the government’s war on weed?
When voters in Colorado and Washington state legalized recreational marijuana in November, they thought they were declaring a cease-fire in the War on Drugs. Thanks to ballot initiatives that passed by wide margins on Election Day, adults 21 or older in both states can now legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana. The new laws also compel Colorado and Washington to license private businesses to cultivate and sell pot, and to levy taxes on the proceeds. Together, the two states expect to reap some $600 million annually in marijuana revenues for schools, roads and other projects. The only losers, in fact, will be the Mexican drug lords, who currently supply as much as two-thirds of America's pot. Drug reformers can scarcely believe their landslide victories at the polls. "People expected this day would come, but most didn't expect it to come this soon," says Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief who campaigned for legalization. "This is the beginning of the end of prohibition." But the war over pot may be far from over. Legalization has set Colorado and Washington on a collision course with the Obama administration, which has shown no sign of backing down on its full-scale assault on pot growers and distributors. Although the president pledged to go easy on medical marijuana – now legal in 18 states – he has actually launched more raids on state-sanctioned pot dispensaries than George W. Bush, and has threatened to prosecute state officials who oversee medical marijuana as if they were drug lords. And while the administration has yet to issue a definitive response to the two new laws, the Justice Department was quick to signal that it has no plans to heed the will of voters. "Enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act," the department announced in November, "remains unchanged." (Rolling Stone)
posted: 12/8/12                   0       22
#2 



10/17/2011  Why Occupy Wall Street Is Bigger Than Left vs. Right
(Matt Taibbi) I was surprised, amused and annoyed all at once when I found out yesterday that some moron-provocateur linked to notorious right-wing cybergoon Andrew Breitbart had infiltrated a series of private e-mail lists – including one that I have been participating in – and was using them to run an exposé on the supposed behind-the-scenes marionetting of the OWS movement by the liberal media. According to various web reports, what happened was that a private "cyber-security researcher" named Thomas Ryan somehow accessed a series of email threads between various individuals and dumped them all on BigGovernment.com, Breitbart's site. Gawker is also reporting that Ryan forwarded some of these emails to the FBI and the NYPD. I have no idea whether those email exchanges are the same as the ones I was involved with. But what is clear is that some private email exchanges between myself and a number of other people – mostly financial journalists and activists who know each other from having covered the crisis from the same angle in the last three years, people like Barry Ritholz, Dylan Ratigan, former regulator William Black, Glenn Greenwald and myself – ended up being made public. (Rolling Stone)
posted: 11/8/11                   0       14
#3 



8/17/2011  Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?
Matt Taibbi: A whistle blower says the agency has illegally destroyed thousands of documents, letting financial crooks off the hook. - Imagine a world in which a man who is repeatedly investigated for a string of serious crimes, but never prosecuted, has his slate wiped clean every time the cops fail to make a case. No more Lifetime channel specials where the murderer is unveiled after police stumble upon past intrigues in some old file – "Hey, chief, didja know this guy had two wives die falling down the stairs?" No more burglary sprees cracked when some sharp cop sees the same name pop up in one too many witness statements. This is a different world, one far friendlier to lawbreakers, where even the suspicion of wrongdoing gets wiped from the record. That, it now appears, is exactly how the Securities and Exchange Commission has been treating the Wall Street criminals who cratered the global economy a few years back. For the past two decades, according to a whistle-blower at the SEC who recently came forward to Congress, the agency has been systematically destroying records of its preliminary investigations once they are closed. By whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals, the SEC has kept an entire generation of federal investigators in the dark about past inquiries into insider trading, fraud and market manipulation against companies like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and AIG. With a few strokes of the keyboard, the evidence gathered during thousands of investigations – "18,000 ... including Madoff," as one high-ranking SEC official put it during a panicked meeting about the destruction – has apparently disappeared forever into the wormhole of history. Under a deal the SEC worked out with the National Archives and Records Administration, all of the agency's records – "including case files relating to preliminary investigations" – are supposed to be maintained for at least 25 years. But the SEC, using history-altering practices that for once actually deserve the overused and usually hysterical term "Orwellian," devised an elaborate and possibly illegal system under which staffers were directed to dispose of the documents from any preliminary inquiry that did not receive approval from senior staff to become a full-blown, formal investigation. Amazingly, the wholesale destruction of the cases – known as MUIs, or "Matters Under Inquiry" – was not something done on the sly, in secret. The enforcement division of the SEC even spelled out the procedure in writing, on the commission's internal website. "After you have closed a MUI that has not become an investigation," the site advised staffers, "you should dispose of any documents obtained in connection with the MUI." (Rolling Stone)
posted: 9/14/11                   0       14
#4 
keywords: Adam Storch, American International Group, Andrew Tong, Bank Of America, Bankers Trust, Barry Walters, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bill Laufer, Charles Grassley, Christopher Cox, Citigroup, Daniel Indiviglio, Darcy Flynn, Davis Polk, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Bank, Financial Crisis, Gary Aguirre, Gary Lynch, George Orwell, George W Bush, Germany, Goldman Sachs, Harry Markopolos, JP Morgan Chase, Jacqueline Millan, Joel Sauer, John Mack, John Nester, Julie Preuitt, Ken Hall, Laurence Brewer, Lehman Brothers, Linda Chatman Thomsen, Lynn Turner, Mary Schapiro, Morgan Stanley, National Archives And Records Administration, Paul Wester, Pequot Capital, Ping Jiang, Police, R Allen Stanford, Richard Walker, Robert Khuzami, Rolf Breuer, Sac Capital, Seaboard, Securities And Exchange Commission, Stephen Cutler, Texas, The Atlantic, US Congress, United States, University Of Pennsylvania, Wall Street, Whistleblowers, William Mclucas, Wilmerhale Add New Keyword To Link



2/16/2011  Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? Financial crooks brought down the world's economy -- but the feds are doing more to protect them than to prosecute them
By Matt Taibbi. Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that." I put down my notebook. "Just that?" "That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there." Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people. This article appears in the March 3, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available now on newsstands and will appear in the online archive February 18. The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft. Lehman Brothers hid billions in loans from its investors. Bank of America lied about billions in bonuses. Goldman Sachs failed to tell clients how it put together the born-to-lose toxic mortgage deals it was selling. What's more, many of these companies had corporate chieftains whose actions cost investors billions — from AIG derivatives chief Joe Cassano, who assured investors they would not lose even "one dollar" just months before his unit imploded, to the $263 million in compensation that former Lehman chief Dick "The Gorilla" Fuld conveniently failed to disclose. Yet not one of them has faced time behind bars. - "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once." (Rolling Stone)
posted: 3/12/11                   0       9
#5 
keywords: Al Dunlap, American International Group, Art Samberg, Arthur Tildesley Jr, Bailouts, Bank Of America, Barack Obama, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Boston, Charles Grassley, Charles Schumer, Citigroup, Columbia University, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Credit Default Swaps, Credit Suisse, Davis Polk & Wardwell, Debevoise & Plimpton, Derek Jeter, Derivatives, Deutsche Bank, Dick Fuld, Dick Walker, Eliot Spitzer, Enron, Eric Dinallo, Fabrice Tourre, Fannie Mae, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, Freddie Mac, Gary Aguirre, Gary Crittenden, Gary Lynch, General Electric, George W Bush, Germany, Goldman Sachs, Government Transparency, Heller Financial, Henry Waxman, Hillary Clinton, Hilton Hotels, Immigration, JP Morgan Chase, Jed Rakoff, Joe Cassano, John Mack, Joseph St Denis, Lanny Breuer, Lehman Brothers, Linda Thomsen, Lloyd Blankfein, Lynn Turner, Mary Jo White, Merrill Lynch, Mexico, Morgan Stanley, New York City, New York Stock Exchange, Office Of The Comptroller Of The Currency, Ohio, Oliver Budde, Paul Berger, Philadelphia, Police, Portfolio Magazine, Preet Bharara, Residential Mortgage-backed Securities, Restricted Stock Units, Rite Aid, Robert Khuzami, Robert Morgenthau, Roger Clemens, Rudy Giuliani, Securities And Exchange Commission, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Sunbeam, Switzerland, Terrorists, US Congress, US Department Of Justice, United States, Wall Street, War On Drugs, Worldcom Add New Keyword To Link



7/9/2009  The Great American Bubble Machine
From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression — and they're about to do it again - But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy. (Rolling Stone)
posted: 5/26/10                   0       16
#6 
keywords: Al Gore, Alan Greenspan, Alternative Energy, American International Group, Arjun Murti, Bailouts, Bank Of America, Barack Obama, Bart Stupak, Bear Stearns, Big Oil, Bill Clinton, Blue Ridge Corporation, Blue Source Llc, British Petroleum, British Petroleum, Brooksley Born, California, California Public Employees' Retirement System, Canada, Carbon Dioxide, Changing World Technologies, Chicago Climate Exchange, Citigroup, Climate Change, Collateralized Debt Obligations, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Countrywide, Cramer & CO, Credit Default Swaps, Daimlerchrysler, David Blood, David Viniar, Dennis Kozlowski, Derivatives, Ebay, Ed Liddy, Electric Vehicles, Eliot Spitzer, Enron, Eric Salzman, Etoys, Fannie Mae, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve, Financial Crisis, Freddie Mac, Gary Gensler, Generation Investment Management, George W Bush, Germany, Gibson Greetings, Goldman Sachs, Great Depression, Green Growth Fund, Gsamp Trust, Henry Paulson, Horizon Wind Energy, International Monetary Fund, Internet, Internet Bubble, Ipos, Italy, J Arons & CO, Jay Ritter, Jerry Yang, Jim Cramer, Jmp Securities, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Mccain, John Thain, Jon Corzine, Joshua Bolten, Kansas, Keith Olbermann, Ken Lay, Ken Newcombe, Larry Summers, Lehman Brothers, Lloyd Blankfein, Lloyd Doggett, Marcus Goldman, Mark Ferguson, Mark Patterson, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Meg Whitman, Merrill Lynch, Michael Greenberger, Michael Hecht, Michael Masters, Moody's, Nasdaq, National Economic Council, Neel Kashkari, Neil Levin, Netzero, New Jersey, New York, New York City, New York Stock Exchange, New York Times, Nicholas Maier, Oil Bubble, Orange County, Peter Harris, Procter & Gamble, Residential Mortgage-backed Securities, Robert Rubin, Robert Steele, Samuel Sachs, Securities And Exchange Commission, Shenandoah Corporation, Sidney Weinberg, Simon Johnson, Standard & Poor's, Stephen Friedman, Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Texas, Tyco International, US Congress, US Department Of The Treasury, US Energy Information Administration, US Government Accountability Office, United States, University Of Florida, University Of Maryland, Wachovia, Wall Street, Webvan, White House, William Dudley, World Bank, Yahoo Add New Keyword To Link



6/10/2009  A Drug War Truce? Obama's new drug czar says the administration won't legalize pot
but pressure for real reform is growing (Rolling Stone)
posted: 6/18/09                   4       21
#7 



3/24/2005  The Long Emergency
What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle? (Rolling Stone)
posted: 5/6/09       1       16
#8 
  Source Removed! AltBib.Com Backup: http://AltBib.Com/bak/dox/615.html



11/18/2003  Crimes Against Nature: Bush is sabotaging the laws that have protected America's environment for more than thirty years
George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit, diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans. I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have asthma, and I watch them struggle to breathe on bad-air days. And they're comparatively lucky: One in four African-American children in New York shares this affliction; their suffering is often unrelieved because they lack the insurance and high-quality health care that keep my sons alive. My kids are among the millions of Americans who cannot enjoy the seminal American experience of fishing locally with their dad and eating their catch. Most freshwater fish in New York and all in Connecticut are now under consumption advisories. A main source of mercury pollution in America, as well as asthma-provoking ozone and particulates, is the coal-burning power plants that President Bush recently excused from complying with the Clean Air Act. (Rolling Stone)
posted: 11/28/10                   0       5
#9 
keywords: 9/11, Abraham Lincoln, Adirondacks, Alcoa, Alternative Energy, Aluminum, Aluminum Company Of America, American Enterprise Institute, American Petroleum Institute, American-indian Tribes, Andrew Card, Anne Gorsuch, Appalachian Mountains, Arctic, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Arizona, Austin, Bears, Big Oil, Bill Clinton, Bracewell, California, Carbon Dioxide, Chevron, Christine Todd Whitman, Christopher Shays, Civil War, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Cleveland, Climate Change, Coal, Colorado, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Connecticut, Cuyahoga River, Delaware River, Denver, Dick Cheney, Dominion Resources, Don Evans, Dow Chemical, Duke Energy, Dupont, Edison Institute, Endangered Species Act, Enron, Entergy, Environmental Protection Agency, Eric Schaeffer, Exxon Mobil, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Federalist Society, Fish, Florida, Food And Drug Administration, Frank Luntz, Franklin D Roosevelt, Fred Palmer, Freedom Of Information Act, Gale Norton, General Electric, General Motors, George Orwell, George W Bush, Germany, Gladys Kessler, Gray Davis, Greenhouse Gases, Haley Barbour, Halliburton, Heritage Foundation, Houston, India, Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, International Biosphere Reserve, Iowa, Italy, J Steven Griles, James Zahn, Jamess Watt, Jeff Ruch, Jerry Falwell, Joe Allbaugh, John Graham, John Mccain, John Pemberton, Joseph Coors, Joseph Lieberman, Karl Rove, Ken Lay, Kentucky, Klamath River, Koch Industries, Kyoto Protocol, Lake Erie, Los Angeles Times, Magna Carta, Mammoth Cave National Park, Marc Himmelstein, Marc Racicot, Marshall Institute, Martin Marietta, Mercury, Methane, Michael Oppenheimer, Middle East, Mike Kelly, Mike Leavitt, Mississippi, Monsanto, Montana, Mountain States Legal Foundation, National Academy Of Sciences, National Aeronautics And Space Administration, National Energy Policy Development Group, National Environmental Strategies, National Marine Fisheries, National Mining Association, National Research Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, New Delhi, New Mexico, New York, Newt Gingrich, Nitrogen Oxide, Nuclear Energy Institute, Oregon, Panthers, Pat Robertson, Patterson, Paul O'neill, Peabody Energy, Pentagon, Police, Pollution, Powder River, Reason Foundation, Reliant Energy, Rita Lavelle, Riverkeeper, Robert Burford, Robert Watson, Rome, Ron Arnold, Ronald Reagan, Sagebrush Rebellion, Salmon, Sierra Club, Smithfield Foods, Spain, Spencer Abraham, Steven Griles, Sulfur Dioxide, Swans, Terrorists, Texaco, Texas, The New York Times, Tom Brown Inc, Tom Delay, Trees, Txu, US Army Corps Of Engineers, US Bureau Of Land Management, US Congress, US Department Of Agriculture, US Department Of Justice, US Department Of The Interior, US Government Accountability Office, US Public Interest Research Group, Unesco, United Kingdom, United Nations, United States, United States Energy Association, Utah, Waterkeeper Alliance, Wayne Valis, West Virginia Coal Association, Westar Energy, White House, William Raney, Wise Use, World Trade Center, Wyoming, Yellowstone Add New Keyword To Link



10/20/1977  The CIA And The Media
How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up - Some of the journalists working the CIA’s side of the street “were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors-without-portfolio for their country...” (Rolling Stone)
posted: 7/22/09                   0       7
#10 




Showing All 10 Matching Links Found